In 2012 and 2013, Belgium endured heavy rainfall as Europe's jet stream changed paths and brought flooding to central Europe. The Flemish Environment Agency needed a better way to inform citizens and water management officials about forecasted flood conditions.
Tracking cellphone activity plays a key role in helping law enforcement officials determine where suspects were before and after crimes were committed.
Variations in the manufacture of batches of pharmaceuticals can force drug companies to discard products, potentially incurring tens of millions of dollars in losses.
As head of digital marketing for the 2013 Indian movie Chennai Express, Shailja Gupta needed to work social media channels to optimize interest in the film. She teamed with Persistent Systems in Pune, India, to analyze social media content. "Just looking at numbers doesn't really help. How you use those numbers for your own strategy is what matters," she says.
Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium turned to cloud-based analytics when it needed a way to better predict how many visitors would be coming on any given day. With 65% of its expenses dedicated to payroll and attendance swings that ranged from 1,200 to 5,000 people per day, finding a way to ensure that staffing levels corresponded to attendance levels represented a huge opportunity for savings. "We live and breathe by attendance at the gate," says Donna Powell, business and administrative services manager at the Tacoma, Wash., facility.
Shine Technologies helped one of Australia's largest online advertising publishers find better ways to target its audiences and break down their behaviors in detail after ad campaigns. A Melbourne-based IT services provider, Shine developed a deep analysis tool that enabled the publisher to gauge the success of ad campaigns and determine how and when audiences interacted.
Founded in 2011, SwiftIQ needed to expand its computing capacity quickly. But instead of building out its own infrastructure, it turned to Google's Cloud Platform for storage, support for long-running processes and the ability to handle unpredictable scale.
Even after successfully deploying electronic medical records, Texas Children's Hospital struggled to accurately identify ways in which it could improve efficiency, effectiveness and health services delivery. The challenge was combining the gold mine of data in the EMR system with data from financial and administrative systems.
Hoping to give its clients a comprehensive view of the information they need to make decisions in the financial markets, Thomson Reuters five years ago rolled out a homegrown financial analysis tool called Eikon.
The 2014 Computerworld Data+ Editors' Choice Awards honorees were selected for their ability to make better business decisions using big data.